The Times Online is currently running a piece about Google’s plan of developing software that will run on a new mobile phone capable of translating foreign languages instantly.  The said new software will be built on Google’s current technologies in voice recognition which it already employed in the Nexus One and automatic translation. And guess what? Google plans to have this new technology ready within a couple of years. If it will be ready within this year or next, I would have thought that the phone which will carry this feature would be the Nexus Two.

But then again a couple of years will be too long for Google to release a follow up to the Nexus One. So, let’s just consider the new phone which will employ this voice translation feature as the Nexus One’s future iteration.

Now going back to the voice translation capable software project, the report said that if this technology works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000 plus languages. And if Google succeeds, this project will certainly have a huge impact in the whole  mobile phone industry.

It may seem impossible, but Google already has the two basic technologies needed to make this  happen. It was able to implement voice recognition on Nexus One while its web translation service is being honed by scanning million of multi-lingual websites and documents, so far covering 52 languages already.

So, it is just a matter of combining these two technologies to produce the software that can understand a caller’s voice and translate it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language.

What do you think? Will Google be able to pull this project through? If it does, then Google is bringing down the international language barrier soon. And why I do feel like Google may succeed?

Originally posted on February 8, 2010 @ 5:14 pm